1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications, and, particularly, a call-intercept system and method implemented for long distance telephone systems that verifies call identities in order to prevent fraudulent calling card usage.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The telecommunication industry has estimated fraud losses are costing telecommunication service providers five (5) billion dollars per year. Particularly, telecommunication fraud losses are attributed to lost, stolen, or compromised portable calling card products, e.g., in highly populated areas. Calling card products may be compromised in various ways, for example, via social engineering, xe2x80x9cshoulder surfingxe2x80x9d, etc., whereby a perpetrator obtains a physical calling card or calling card number belonging to another. Primarily, the perpetrator utilizes the stolen calling card/card number to place a call to a desired location or termination, whether domestic or international.
Residential customers of large telecommunication service providers, e.g., MCI WorldCom, are typically the prey for these types of fraud, and, industry studies have determined that the fraud losses will only increase in the future.
It would be highly desirable to provide telecommunications service providers with the ability to control and prevent fraudulent calling card usage while minimizing the impact to the customer.
The present invention is directed to a call intercept process (CIP) that functions to intercept callers calling for a first time to predefined high fraud countries, in order to verify the identity of the caller. In operation, a perpetrator who has obtained a calling card product, i.e., the physical calling card or the calling card number itself, and attempts to terminate a calling card call to a predefined international destination that is considered high fraud risk, will first default to an manual operator or automated response unit (operator). The operator or unit will prompt the caller for the name and account information as it appears on the calling card owner""s billing account. The operator will fail the call if the perpetrator disconnects the call or is unable to provide correct name and address billing information as it appears on the account. If the caller fails or hangs up, the card is placed in a xe2x80x9clocked statusxe2x80x9d mode and will be intercepted regardless of the termination location until such time the caller passes an account verification requirement. This process will be repeated for each calling card usage attempt until, the correct account verification is given. After a predetermined number of attempts at making a call are made, further calls will be defaulted to a second level operator who may further verify the caller""s identity.
During this process, once the caller passes by giving the correct verification information, the CIP process places the card in a database and the card is over-ridden and will not be interrupted with intercept on future calls.
Advantageously, passed and failed call intercept calls may generate alarms for monitoring by a fraud control system. The fraud control system will review the alarms to determine if actions are warranted to block the calling card.